June 11, 2007. Palo Altans interested in FTTH are urged to express support for the proposed citywide open-access Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network to be owned and managed by a public/private partnership in an email toCity.Council@CityofPaloAlto.org Emails should be sent by Noon, Monday, June 18.

The Council meeting begins at 7 PM, June 18, in the City Hall Council Chambers, 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto. Your attendance is encouraged.

For a preliminary outline of what will be discussed at the June 18 Council meeting, click here. For background and insights regarding the proposed citywide open FTTH network, go to iPaloAlto.

May 16, 2007 It’s Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless Spectrum. The spectrum that's coming up for grabs is prime stuff: A large, low-frequency band that's currently being used by UHF television stations, which have been ordered to vacate it when broadcasting goes digital in February 2009. A broadband wireless network operating in this UHF range would be far more powerful than the municipal Wi-Fi and WiMax networks now being built by Google, EarthLink and other companies. Such a network would be cheaper to build as well. Because radio waves in the UHF band travel much farther than the high-frequency signals used for Wi-Fi and WiMax, a single tower could cover as much as 10 times the area. This new wireless spectrum could be open or closed access, depending upon who wins the FCC award.

May 10, 2007 “AT&T spying on Internet traffic,” whistle-blower tells Wired magazine. Documents show that AT&T built a network-monitoring facility in a nondescript room at an Internet switching hub in San Francisco, at 611 Folsom St.reet.

April 29, 2007 Really poor customer service scores, Comcast (#2 @ 30%) and AT&T (#5 @ 26%) are in the Customer Service Hall of Shame bottom five for terrible service, a new MSN-Money-Zogby poll found. The telecom industry has six of ten of the companies customers hate most. Do you think monopolistic attitudes might have something to do with it?

April 9, 2007 Palo AltoMayor Yoriko Kishimoto appointed two members of the public to serve as ad-hoc advisers to staff as they follow up on the Broadband proposal; they are Bob Harrington and Andy Poggio. Each has filed Form 700 to avoid any potential conflicts of interest.

December 15, 2006 Doc Searls Weblogsaysthe Charles H. Giancarlo piece turns into an anti-Net Neutrality press release by the telco/cable duopoly. It's a bummer to see an executive of Charles Giancarlo's stature argue that an unfettered telco/cable duopoly is our best bet for becoming a global broadband leader. That's not what the duopoly cares about, and it never has been.

December 14, 2006The Internet accelerates as the U.S. lags behind, op-ed in San Francisco Chronicle by Charles H. Giancarlo, who is senior vice president and chief development officer of Cisco Systems, president of Linksys LLC and a member of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Broadband Task Force says video will emerge as the common language of Internet communication, but video requires big bandwidth at economical prices that America’s networks don’t have…America risks becoming an Internet also-ran.

October, 2006 Jim Baller and Casey Lideare saying the United States has fallen far behind the leading nations in access to high-capacity broadband connectivity, cost per unit of bandwidth, and growth of broadband subscribers. In Japan, ordinary households can now obtain 100 Mbps of connectivity for less than $40 per month. America needs a national broadband policy now.

January 17, 2006iPaloAlto EXCLUSIVE…The exact Palo Alto City Council motion creating the Broadband RFP, word for word Councilmember discussion, and final 5-1 vote passing the motion. The motion says, “City contributions may include assigning, with operational and other limitations, use and control of the City’s dark fiber ring and the City’s existing trial network. The Council recognizes the need to contribute or guarantee financial or other assets to the project to achieve the primary goals. Responses to this RFP should include City financial risk mitigations such as “off-ramps” at increments of $5 million of City risk.”